Hard Drive Not Being Detected
 

I have a Gateway machine and I had Windows XP installed on it. About 6 months ago I used Linux, but switch to Windows to play games. Just recently, I decided to switch back to Linux and use Debian. I ran into problems and reformatted my hard drive and I went to install Debian 3.1. When the installer came to the partitioning part of the install, it never detected my hard drive. It just detected 4 SCSI 1.1 GB USB drives which I don't know what they are. It never said anything about my 200 GB hard drive. I then used a Live CD distro and it as well wasn't able to read my hard drive. The same thing happened when I tried to install an old version of Red Hat I had. When I used the Windows' CD, it sees and reads the hard drive. What's wrong?

I have no clue, but if this were my machine, I'd try to wipe everything off that hd and start over.
http://www.toms.net/rb/
Makes a great rescue floppy. At the very least, try to get a rescue distro to find the hard drive in the first place. Failing that, get a DOS boot disk and see if you can boot it with just DOS and do a "format C:".

My other guess is BIOS, maybe it got accidentally configured to ignore one of your IDE devices. Try hitting the "del' key or whatever your BIOS says for 'setup' during it's POST sequence (the first or second text screen you see after turning the machine on) and see if BIOS can find your hd.

PS It's quite easy to dual boot Windows and Linux these days, as long as Windows gets to be first (because it insists on owning the Master Boot Record!). But I always dual boot with two hard drives (one with Windows on the drive set to Master, the other with Linux on the slave drive, and I boot Linux from the floppy.) As a bonus, I get to mount the Windows hard drive from Linux and use Linux tools to de-malware Windows! Windows runs better when it's been lobotomized and turned into Linux's docile lap dog...

PPS I make a point to hassle retail software distributers about the lack of commercial games for Linux. I figure if they hear from enough people...

I checked the bios before and it sees the hard drive. This is a fairly new computer so it doesn't have a floppy drive so I couldn't do the rescue disk option. I also wiped everything from the hard drive to see if that helped and to delete everything since screwed up trying to resize my Windows partition with Partition Magic and installing Linux to dual-boot.
One thing I did find out is that the hard drive connects with two different kinds wires than the ones on my other computer. The other computer connects with the pin stuff while the other doesn't, but instead, it uses something like you would see on graphics cards, sound cards, RAM, etc. Could that be a problem?
EDIT: I just plugged in an external USB drive and Linux doesn't see it as well.
EDIT2: Solved it. My hard drive uses SATA which isn't supported from what I read. I switched it to PATA and it works now. Thanks.